BRITISH courts could order electronic tagging of offenders as young as 10 years of age under a Bill going through parliament, a government minister said yesterday.
Pilot schemes for the electronic monitoring of curfew orders for offenders aged 16 and over have been running in Britain since July 1995.
"Juveniles can already be subject to a curfew as part of a supervision order, but only in the evening and at night," said the Home Office minister, Mr David Maclean. "Electronic monitoring will detect immediately whether the offender is breaking the curfew."
Tackling juvenile crime and raising moral standards among Britain's youth is a hot political issue for both Conservative and Labour politicians ahead of next year's general election.
The new Bill before parliament would give courts in selected areas the power to impose a curfew and electronic tagging on offenders aged from 10 to 15.
The tagging proposal follows a public spending watchdog report published yesterday which said the justice system for juveniles was in disarray and failing to cut crime despite costing £1 billion a year.
An 18 month study by the government funded audit commission said only 3 per cent of the estimated seven million crimes committed by 10 to 17 year olds each year lead to an arrest.
A penal reform pressure group yesterday condemned the plans to extend tagging. "This is one of the worst ideas yet to tackle juvenile crime," said Mr Paul Cavadino, chairman of the Penal Affairs Consortium. "It suggests that the government is more concerned to appear tough than to examine hard evidence about which measures work best in preventing re offending."
Electronic tagging was designed and first used in 1983 by Judge Jack Love in New Mexico, who said he was inspired by a Spiderman comic.
About 50,000 people are currently tagged in the US. The first trials in Britain in 1989 were abandoned after most of the people tagged either absconded or were charged with new offences. New trials began in July 1995 and have been extended into next year in Manchester, Reading and Norfolk.
. Poor teaching is contributing to the rise in the number of children expelled from British schools, the chief schools inspector said yesterday.
Mr Chris Woodhead, head of the Office for Standards in Education, said pupils who had not been taught to read adequately at primary school were likely to become frustrated and disruptive at secondary school.